Cristina Peri Rossi – författare

In The Museum of Useless Efforts Cristina Peri Rossi renders familiar, everyday situations uncanny through lyrical reinterpretations; at the same time, she somehow makes the uncanny appear quite ordinary. Crafting peculiar—and sometimes claustrophobically small—worlds, Peri Rossi explores the universal themes of desire, violence, and truth and the simultaneous and contradictory human capacities to repress and resist, speak and silence, desire and ignore. In these tales an insomniac is tormented by a stubborn lamb that refuses to jump over the fence; the momentary hesitation of a man on a crowded subway staircase who forgets whether he was going up or down unleashes pandemonium; and a patient receives a frantic call from his psychoanalyst, distraught that his wife has taken a new lover.

Solitaire of Love, an achingly lyrical novel by internationally acclaimed Latin American writer Cristina Peri Rossi, explores the sense of emotional exile that sexual passion can evoke. Only the fourth book of Peri Rossi’s to be translated into English-the others are The Ship of Fools, A Forbidden Passion, and Dostoevsky’s Last Night-Solitaire of Love showcases the mesmerizingly rhythmic language that has become the trademark of this award-winning and prolific author of novels, essay collections, poetry, and short stories.Tracing the course of a relationship as it evolves into uncompromising self-destruction, the narrator of Solitaire of Love becomes addicted to his own passion and to the body of his beloved. Erotic, romantic love becomes bewitchment, producing a heightened state where time is measured in the rhythms of a chosen body and pride becomes subservient to obsession. The specifics of this other body trump any claim to ordinary existence for the narrator, as sex becomes a kind of idolatrous slavery and love becomes a mechanism for self-immolation. As in Peri Rossi’s other works, an ambiguous sense of gender and sexuality arise from her uniquely experimental prose and mystically erotic logic. Language is subsumed into this process as a way to bear witness, to transfix and capture the love object. The limbo of obsession, as described by Peri Rossi, creates an infantilizing brand of loneliness, broken by flashes of joy, insight, fury, and fear. This novel was originally published in Spanish in 1988.

Cristina Peri Rossi was born in Uruguay and is considered a leading light of the "Latin American Boom" generation. In 1972, after her work was banned under a repressive military regime, she left her country, moving to Spain. This collection of poems, written during her journey and the first period of her self-exile, was so personal that it remained unpublished for almost thirty years. It is accompanied here by two brilliant essays on exile, one by Peri Rossi and the other by translator Marilyn Buck, who is an American political prisoner, exiled in her own land. Cristina Peri Rossi is the author of thirty-seven works, including The Ship of Fools.

Evoe är en lyrisk hyllning till kärleken och begäret; en lovsång till språket och orden. Diktsamlingen publicerades första gången 1971 i Montevideo, där den orsakade stor skandal på grund av sina frispråkiga skildringar av lesbisk kärlek och boken blev snart förbjuden av militärjuntan. Med åren har den blivit en kultbok, läst och hyllad för sina erotiska beskrivningar som på ett närmast religiöst språk upphöjer den åtrådda kvinnan, samtidigt som den med humor och ironi ”avdramatiserar passionens förödande följder”, som Cristina Peri Rossi själv skriver i förordet. Cristina Peri Rossi föddes 1941 i Montevideo. Hon är en av den spanskspråkiga världens främsta författare och 2021 tilldelades hon det prestigefyllda Cervantespriset. 1972 tvingades hon i exil och är sedan länge bosatt i Barcelona. Evoe var hennes debut som poet och den har följts av ett tjugotal diktsamlingar. Förutom poesi har hon även skrivit romaner, noveller och personliga berättelser, bland annat en bok om sin nära vänskap med Julio Cortázar. Hennes senaste diktsamling Fata Morgana kom 2024.